Some Sacramento houses selling for less than $25,000

It's now possible to buy a Sacramento home for less than the price of a Honda Accord.

At least two dozen homes in the Sacramento region sold during the last three months for $25,000 or less, and more are coming onto the market almost daily – a record number for this decade in such a short period of time.

For that price, you can get a home with a leaky roof. Or severe fire damage. There's a strong chance someone squatted in the home, taking everything good – pray for deals on copper piping – and leaving a lot of bad: trash and holes in the walls, if you're lucky.

In Oak Park and Del Paso Heights, for example, median home prices have fallen 80 percent from their mid-2006 peak to around $60 a square foot. That's about the cost of a house today in the 120-degree, high desert heat of Needles, Calif.

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Still, in some ways the rock-bottom prices are a boon for the areas, according to real estate experts and community activists. All these houses are foreclosures; many have been vacant for more than a year, stripped by thieves and sucking the surrounding neighborhoods deeper into blight.

Offer homes for $25,000 and investors swoop in, even though typically they must pay cash and spend more to fix them up. Once repaired, the homes can become cash cows.